I’m guessing Steam decided against being able to leave your games to somebody else when you die because of how most EULAs I’ve read work: they are often non-transferrable licence and so in most cases the store has no choice in the matter. Now GOG are willing to say they will do what they can given this limitation, but I can see why Steam wouldn’t: it’s a whole lot of work for realistically not much benefit. It’s probably easier for Valve to gift the same games over to the new person.
Pretty sure that's the technicality GoG is using when they keep saying all this sort of stuff. Their terms of service have effectively the same language about purchases only being a license that Steam does.
"In general, your GOG account and GOG content is not transferable. However, if you can obtain a copy of a court order that specifically entitles someone to your GOG personal account, the digital content attached to it taking into account the EULAs of specific games within it, and that specifically refers to your GOG username or at least email address used to create such an account, we'd do our best to make it happen. We're willing to handle such a situation and preserve your GOG library—but currently we can only do it with the help of the justice system."
That's a very fancy way of saying "we'll comply with a court order", which is what any business would do.
This is marketing fluff. DRM free is good enough reason to like them without framing them as fixing literally every problem with steam.
Wills aren't required and not everyone will have one.
I think the best course of action is to have a trust set up and have all of your assets under the trust. That's how my attorney set up my end of life tasks. It saves you problems with probate and taxes while also giving you flexibility if you want to change things.
Market share. I know it's a meme but seriously, push Linux on people who will benefit from it.
My girlfriend is totally non-technical but I set her up with an old laptop running Debian and after a few months she loved it. No ads, no popups selling cloud storage, no forced reboots, and it doesn't crash. That's one more browser hitting websites without Windows in it's useragent string.
bequeath /bĭ-kwēᴛʜ′, -kwēth′/
transitive verb
To leave or give (personal property) by will.
To pass (something) on to another; hand down.
"bequeathed to their children a respect for hard work."
To give or leave by will; to give by testament; -- said especially of personal property.
GOG is “Good Old Games”, a digital distribution service for PC games run by CD Projekt Red, developers of The Witcher and Cyberpunk. It mostly focuses on old games from the Win95/98 days that have been patched/fixed by their in-house dev team to run on modern Windows releases. However, it also sells all CD Projekt Red titles and seems to be expanding to just be a regular PC game distribution service.
It’s being talked about a lot right now because unlike Steam, EGS, and other stores they sell you a DRM-free download. Because of recent legislation in California, companies are required to use clearer language when they aren’t selling you something that you own forever, they are instead selling you a license to access something.
This has reignited discussion on digital ownership, Steam, and what happens if you die or Steam shuts down/is acquired and you lose your non-transferable access to the games in your library. GOG is the ideal solution right now, because it while it offers a client that is simple to use like Steam (called “GOG Galaxy”) but if they announce a shutdown or acquisition, you can simply download offline installers for all your games and you don’t lose access to anything.
Competitor to steam, it's selling points are DRM free games releasing old games in playable States for modern machines. They also sell contemporary games.